In Wrong anticipation - Miscalibrated beliefs between germans, israelis, and palestinians

Sebastian J. Goerg, Heike Hennig-Schmidt, Gari Walkowitz, Eyal Winter

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

The reconcilability of actions and beliefs in inter-country relationships, either in business or politics, is of vital importance as incorrect beliefs on foreigners' behavior can have serious implications. We study a typical inter-country interaction by means of a controlled laboratory investment game experiment in Germany, Israel and Palestine involving 400 student participants in total. An investor has to take a risky decision in a foreign country that involves transferring money to an investee/allocator. We found a notable constellation of calibrated and un-calibrated beliefs. Within each country, transfer standards exist, which investees correctly anticipate within their country. However, across countries these standards differ. By attributing the standard of their own environment to the other countries investees are remarkably bad in predicting foreign investors' behavior. The tendency to ignore this potential difference can be a source of misinterpreting motives in cross-country interaction. Foreigners might perceive behavior as unfavorable or favorable differentiation, even though-unknown to them-investors actually treat fellow-country people and foreigners alike.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0156998
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume11
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2016

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Goerg et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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